This is what the video looks like when downloaded from. We’re only going to work with 17 seconds of it to save some time. This is an open-source film by Sacha Goedegebure available under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. So, who’s our sacrificial video? We’re going to use a classic video for the demonstration here-perhaps too classic for people that work with video- Big Buck Bunny.

The most accessible is the most obvious: compare two versions of a video by having people look at them-a subjective comparison. To determine what looks better, video engineers can use a variety of techniques. However, when you’re storing, encoding, and distributing it, how that video looks determines how happy your viewers are. That’s not an issue when you’re just consuming video.

Most people, though, would have difficulty elaborating on what ‘better’ means.

People can prefer one version of a video over another and say it looks better. We’ll go on a deep dive on how to make some victim video look gloriously bad and learn on the way.Įveryone agrees that video on the Internet should look good, start playing fast, and never rebuffer regardless of the device they’re on. Instead of aiming for perfection, let’s see the impact of various video coding settings. Today we’ll make it easy to see changes between different versions of a video: we’ll start with a high-quality video and ruin it. Instead of fine-grained optimization work, we’ll do the opposite. And that makes the results of those tweaks less intuitive. That involves a lot of small tweaks to our video pipeline that can be difficult to discern by most people. On the Stream team at Cloudflare, we work to provide a great viewing experience while keeping our service affordable.

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